Dr. Heidi Jannenga

For more than 20 years, Heidi Jannenga, PT, DPT, ATC, has advocated advancing the rehab therapy profession. And it all started with a basketball injury.

Jannenga’s interest in physical therapy began with her own rehabilitation after suffering a knee injury while playing basketball for the University of California- Davis. She wanted to have that same impact on the lives of others and changed her major to physical therapy.

Today, the company Jennenga Co-founded, WebPT, holds approximately 50% market share and serves more than 140,000 rehab therapy professionals across more than 17,000 clinics nationwide. WebPT is the fastest-growing outpatient rehab software platform in the country and has earned a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation’s fastest-growing companies nine years in a row.

“Much of WebPT’s growth can be credited to our people-first approach to business, which is directly tied to our unique, award-winning culture,” Jannenga said. “As a company grows, culture must be prioritized, continuously nurtured and woven into everything that you do from recruiting to performance reviews. Embraced from the top-level executive to the entry-level employee, culture is a differentiator for WebPT.”

After graduating with a master’s degree in physical therapy from the University of St. Augustine, Jannenga began a 15-plus-year career as a practicing physical therapist, eventually becoming a leading sports physical therapist. She earned a postprofessional doctorate of physical therapy through Evidence in Motion’s Executive Program in Private Practice Management. In 2006, while working as a Clinic Director, Jannenga was responsible for overseeing profits and losses and sought to cut back on dictation and paper documentation costs. After shopping around for a few months, Jannenga and her technology Co-founder could not find an effective solution and set out to create their own. In 2008, WebPT was born.

Jannenga serves on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Arizona Science Center, the Institute for Private Practice Physical Therapy, Conscious Capitalism AZ Chapter, Greater Phoenix Economic Council, Arizona School for the Arts, FLINN Foundation and Arizona Community Foundation. She also launched her own foundation, Rizing Tide, to promote diversity in rehab therapy by providing scholarships to BIPOC students.

Musculoskeletal care will be an important focus for WebPT in the coming years. Approximately 126.6 million Americans are impacted by a musculoskeletal condition, costing about $213 billion every year in treatment, care and lost wages. The numbers will only increase over the next two decades as adults over the age of 65 become the most populous age group in our nation.

“By creating an affordable, intuitive and technologically sound cloud-based platform for rehab therapists, Heidi has led a digital revolution that has forever changed the industry,” Jannenga’s team said.